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Why, Jo Brand, why?
This was the question I, and many other viewers no doubt, was asking – no, screaming – on Saturday night when ITV started broadcasting its brand new “entertainment” series, Splash.
For those of you who didn’t see it – and trust me, it has to be seen to be believed – the show features celebrities diving in to a swimming pool having been trained beforehand by Olympic star Tom Daley, only to be given scores by a judging panel.
And Brand, in case you haven’t guessed where I am going with this, is part of the judging panel. That’s right, the judging panel. For a show about diving.
Now I’m no expert on all things Brand, but I know that she’s not best known for her diving expertise. And it seems I’m right, as the press pack for the series proudly lists the judging panel as “diving coach Andy Banks”, “former Olympic diving medalist Leon Taylor” and “comedienne, writer and actress Jo Brand”. The clue is there in black and white.
My heart sinks a little. Yes you expect to see a certain type of “celebrity” on this show – but as contestants. Those desperately trying to claw their way back into the public’s affection, such as, in this instance, Helen Lederer and Omid Djalili. Oh, and some guy who told us we would all know him best from the TV series Benidorm. But I’d never seen him before in my life before the weekend and now I’ve seen far too much of him. In every sense.
But what, I wonder, compelled Brand to put her reputation as a smart and savvy writer, actor and presenter at risk by agreeing to take part in something that was quite obviously going to be rubbish, no matter how persuasive the producers may have been when they contacted her?
I can only imagine the conversation:
“Hi Jo, it’s ITV. We’ve got a series coming up in which some celebrities are going to hurl themselves into a swimming pool and we’d like you to judge it.”
“But I don’t know anything about diving.”
“Oh that doesn’t matter. Dawn French didn’t know much about musical theatre when we took her on for Superstar and she was fine.”
“Fair enough. I’m in.”
No doubt ITV hoped Brand would add some humour to the series, but as it happens the sight of Lederer in her swimming costume did the trick.
Basically, Brand couldn’t save this show, which took bad television to a whole new level. And yet ratings suggest around six million people tuned in, although I’m guessing that most of those viewers, like me, were probably too stunned to turn over.
As I tweeted at the weekend, the show would have benefited from having crocodiles or sharks in to the swimming pool. Someone else suggested that removing the water altogether would have livened things up. Ouch.
But Splash raises a serious question about the future of Saturday night entertainment. With the awful Animal Antics on BBC1 starting last weekend too, I wonder if some commissioners have lost touch with what viewers find entertaining? And with The X Factor past its sell by date, and, dare I say it, Strictly Come Dancing becoming a little bit tiresome, I think it’s time Saturday night TV had an overhaul. And ITV can start by scrapping Splash.
Jobs & Auditions
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A large part of why Saturday Night TV is so bland at present is the general mircomanaging at the terrestrial TV channels. We have all the talent in this country that always had, they are even working within the channels but their superiors are simply not programme makers. The likes of Fincham, Hunt and Diamond, both at ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 move around channels and produce the same tired programmes and have zero clues on what the audiences wants because they never got their hands dirty making programmes.
I listened to Fincham in Edinburgh last year and I’ve never seen anyone more out of touch with the audience. No clue about what makes a good programme or what the audience will be entertain or bored by. His goal is about targets, focus groups and agendas to him and the equally clueless board at ITV back him up to make such terrible decisions. If a programme like Splash crashes and burns and cancelled within one series, no one at ITV will be blamed and they will move on to their next celebrity-drived disaster in the autumn. No lessons will be learnt, the presenters and executives like Fincham will remain.
It the same story at Channel 4 with Jay Hunt, her search for ratings is forcing creative programme makers to leave in droves and the channels ends up solely relying on a few programmes left.
There are plenty of talent who are capable of making worthwhile TV like back in the 70s/80s but they are held hostage by the mircomanagement that they likes of Fincham and Hunt & all what happens is that the talent pool gets dwindle down to one indivisual who track record is mediocre like Come Dine with Me or just plain terrible like The Marriage Ref. It all too common with TV today and it goes on at the BBC as well. It is a huge syndrome that needs to be wiped out from TV centres if we want our programmes to be up to the standards they were in the 70s/80s when you had none of that nonsense. The more executives try to mirco-manage, the less successful programmes will be.
The executives at BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5 need to trust creatives to be creative again while they themselves nurture the finance for talent and get out of way of making programmes. We have all the talent still to make such great programmes, our industry is buzzing with creativity, but executive interference is killing their translation onto TV. It is the only way we today can get better TV but with the government continuing to allow the march of executives, I cannot see it improving and we end up with more programmes like this in the future.Report comment